We employed a hodge-podge of gear - some rented, some ours - all based around my increasingly outdated MOTU 896HD interface and a much improved Logic Studio 9. Some late nights, a few hearty laughs, and a bottle of Weller later, we have a collection of our most recent work to audition for you over the next two nerve-wracking weeks of The Sound and The Jury contest to play ACL.

Tubes on tubes

For the few recording wonks out there, here are the deets:

DRUMS

Jo played on his most excellent mid 1960s Ludwig Super Classics - 9x13 rack, 16x16 floor, 14x22 kick - with an Olive badge Supraphonic 402 snare and a mix of Bosphorus and Istanbul Agop cymbals. The kit was recorded using two Peluso 2247LE mics (U47 clones) in the classic Glyn Johns configuration (see: The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Eagles, and The Who). With this method, one mic is placed about 3' above the snare and hi-hat, looking roughly at the rack tom, while the other mic peeks over the floor tom back toward the snare. Most importantly, both mics are equidistant from the center of the snare to achieve phase coherency.

Glyn Johns

We mic'd the kick drum (full resonant head, about 6" away) with a Peluso R14 ribbon mic, loosely based on the Royer R121 - this proved to be a mixed bag. The ribbon gave us scads of thumpy low-end, but I had a lot of trouble pulling beater definition out in the mix later on. On the snare, we used the Shure SM7B - basically a 57 with an improved transformer - which worked out quite well. The overhead mics were run through a Presonus ADL600 stereo tube preamp (two thumbs up), the kick fed into a Groove Tubes ViPre, and the snare went to a Focusrite ISA One. In the mix, the drums were processed minimally with parallel compression and a touch of reverb, all from the Logic plug-ins.

BASS

Jack dished out some pretty mighty low-end from his Fender Custom Shop '59 Precision Bass strung up with flatwound strings into an all-tube Mesa 1x15" combo from the mid 1990s. We mic'd the speaker with the Peluso 2247, about a foot and a half away. For outboard, we used the Groove Tubes ViPre preamp (good for anything you want to sound big) and a Summit TLA-100A compressor (all-tube, based on the LA2A - very musical).

GUITAR

For my guitar sounds, I used my Custom Shop Tele through a cranked Dr Z Route 66 amplifier. We mic'd a Celestion G12H30 with an SM57 into the ViPre at 300 ohms to roll off some low-end and enhance the midrange. Delay was provided by a Boss DD-20 pedal.

KEYS

If I take one solid lesson away from these sessions, it's this:

Always record non-piano keyboards through tube guitar amps.

Rhodes, synths, organ - whatever. If you don't have a real deal Hammond B3 with a Leslie in your living room, then you should probably be recording your organ sounds through tube amps.

We recorded the Rhodes with a Nord Electro 2 into a Dr. Z Carmen Ghia (18 watts, EL84 tubes). The Korg synth was tracked using a 1971 Fender Musicmaster Bass amp - a little 12 watt practice amp that has no low-end or high-end, but makes up for it with the most bitchin' thick crunchy midrange around. For the B3 sounds, we put the left output of the Nord into the Ghia and the right into the Musicmaster for some Leslie-simulating goodness. For mics, we used the ribbon on the synths and the SM7B on everything else. No compression, no effects.

AJ likes it!

VOCALS

Many shootouts later, we discovered that Jack and I sound best through the SM7B, running into a 300 ohm load on the ADL600, and AJ sounds best through the Peluso 2247. All vocals were tracked with compression from the Summit. I used a nice EMT plate simulation for reverb during mixing.

Background vocals and harmonies were tracked with a spaced pair of the 2247 mics in omni, panned hard left and right in the mix.

Shit yeah! Layin down the fat tambo/shaker trax!

PERCUSSION

Tambourine (Jack) and shaker (A.J.) mic'd with the 2247.

For those recording-inclined among you, I hope this has been helpful, interesting, or at least maybe a warning what not to do. :-) For the rest of you poor souls, thanks for bearing through it all.